New Blogs for Chinese Study

by John Pasden

06 Apr 2004

In the past few days I’ve gotten word of two new blogs that should be of interest to students of Chinese of at least intermediate level.

The first one is by Stian in Hangzhou, titled “In the Middle.” Stian takes digital pictures of Chinese “posters, black board writings or graffiti” and puts them online with accompanying translations. Neat idea. He tries to stay neutral about the contents, hence the name. His current entries are school notices.

[I’m also glad to see that he’s using ModBlog, which contributes to Adopt a Blog‘s aim of spreading China blogs out on as many different servers as possible.]

The other one is News in Chinese, by Roddy (of Chinese Forums fame) in Beijing. In this blog Roddy provides links to news stories in Chinese. The goal is to make the task of browsing for interesting news stories easier for the student of Chinese. I’ll be using this one.

One small concern, though. As of this afternoon, News in Chinese was blocked for me here in Shanghai. I hope it’s just a temporary quirk, as Roddy says there’s no problem connecting directly in Beijing.

Comments

Not every time you can’t access a site in the States directly and can via proxy is a case of blocking. There seems to be a lot of issues with DNS requests timing out, as was the issue with Slashdot a few days ago.

That said, right now I can access News in China just fine, so it was probably just something temporary.

Yes, “In the Middle” IS very cool. I like the public-service announcements, though there are too many words in them. They should be more succinct and always show the same message so people will remember them easily. There should only be 3 messages, and if every Chinese person were to follow all 3, what a marvelous country it would be! Here they are:

DON’T LITTER!

DON’T SPIT OR BLOW YOUR NOSE ON THE GROUND!

IF A GRANNY COMES ON THE BUS, LET HER HAVE YOUR SEAT!

FOLLOW ALL 3 RULES BECAUSE THEY’RE THE DECENT THING TO DO! THE SPIRIT OF CHAIRMAN MAO IS LOOKING OVER YOU, MOTHERFUCKERS!